Gee what was I thinking?

When the Placer County Master Gardeners showed up at my home and asked if I would like to put our garden on the tour, I willingly said yes. A week later I looked at the garden and saw all the mess from the afterbloom of thousands of daffodils, I wondered what I could do to make it look better and make sure I had color in the garden. The daffodil leaves cannot be cut off until they turn yellow, because they require the sun and nutrients to replenish the bulb for next season.

Since that time I have been working feverishly to clean up ever inch of our property to make sure it looks well cared for, neat and pretty. Weeds seem to know this and I whenever I clear a flowerbed and move on to another area, during the night they send up new shoots to make me think I didn't weed the bed. I know some of it is due to the frequent rain showers that are helping the weed seeds in the soil to germinate, but wow, there must be centuries of accumulation!  Either that or the neigbors trolls are spreading new seeds in the dark of night.

I have been systematically cleaning out leaves, weeds, dead branches, old growth in all the flower beds and rearranging and planting new flower varieties that should be in bloom in May. Unfortunately, whenever I distrurb the soil, new weeds sprout because I gave their seeds the right conditions to germinate. I should mulch the beds when I finish, and that would slow down the weeds and also capture the moisture for my new plantings.

One of the biggest jobs was finishing a 130 foot drainage line from the front of the house to the back, inorder to divert all the water that pours into our property from the street. This project took a week, but it did work well when everything was put back and the pipe was in. A good torrential rain was a good test for it. Another  huge job was digging out the stumps of an 18 year old Oleander and a Lelandia Cypress that I had to cut down. Relandscaping and cleaning everything up took several days. The new look is a lot more pleasing, but I was sore for several days after.

I still have to finish taking all the bark out of the rose garden and reusing it in other parts of the garden, and then putting out new redwood mulch that is finer and more appropriate to dress it all back up. Fortunately I stopped the spread of Blackspot, and hopefully I can keep the aphids at bay until they begin to bloom in a few weeks.  Lets hope the weather holds and I can stay on track to assure that the garden is pristine for Mother's Day.  Oh well, so much for the break, time to get back to work!